Take the details of my promotion. You could read it if you like but it’s all clauses and multipoints and corporate trash. The upshot is that my work on Animal Farm Mark 4: Kids’ Revolt was just too fucking good. I ran it smoother than if I was taking candy from a baby. It was a bit harder when they’d activate the RattleBattleTM weapons but that only usually happened at level 4 and mostly they just stuck to the kindergarten stages talking weed and dates and shit.

But this is something else.

<HTTP ERROR 400: Bad Request>

Ignore that, just glitching. You know, first day ripples spreading out, settling in.

Where was I?

That’s it. It was all toddler play, pissing about monitoring kids and their pumped up avis, throwing my weight around in their digital playground. This is just something else. You should have seen this guy just then; paging through the usual facetime porn they all go for, then he only goes and gets his ferrets out. Bloody hell, I don’t think they liked it. Cardboard tube Armageddon.

<HTTP ERROR 404: Not Found>

Forget that.

Tell me – what would you do if you were everywhere? Cos that is what it’s like. All the tentacles of the world, they’re all right here – hardwired fingers dripping into my brain, all hot and sticky and delicious.

<HTTP ERROR 403: Forbidden>

Of course, this is technically probation, but, you know, fuck that – how can you be on probation when you’re the one in charge of the grid? I make the rules. I am the rules.

Jesus, this is awesome. You should be here, you should be me – get to see it all, take it in. But, hey, there’s only one of me and it’s fucking busy.

<HTTP ERROR 429: Too Many Requests>

It’s coming in quick now. Faster, harder. I’ll tell you more but, hang it, I’ve gotta see this… There’s a woman in China and her voice is leaking through like it’s pure fucking silk… There’s a kid in Devon and he fancies himself a crackhack. He’s sending out reams of cover-emails that ain’t even coming close to hiding his bandwidth Ponzi scheme… There’s a guy in Belize and he’s running sermons and preaching his church, making noise over the web and calling himself God.

I squeeze down on his network supply, watch his face flicker into nothingness.